


Wish to Overlook

by Qpengsin98 (Qpenguin98)



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Angst, Depression, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Self-Harm, Suicide Attempt, also idk what this is guys, im not that mean, note the lack of major character death
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-02-23
Updated: 2017-02-23
Packaged: 2018-09-26 10:41:44
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,167
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9891050
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Qpenguin98/pseuds/Qpengsin98
Summary: He uses all his energy to push himself into an upright sitting position, scrubbing at his eyes. He feels scrubby, scratchy.He feels how he felt in the desert, how he felt sometimes at the Garrison. Very low.





	

Keith is so so so tired. He lays in bed, trying to will himself up to go train with Shiro, but he doesn’t have the energy. He smushes his face into his pillow and lets the tension bleed back out of him. It’s been like this for about a week, but today is the first day he hasn’t had the will to get out of bed.

It’s a while later that he gets a knock on the door. He makes a noncommittal noise in response. The door opens, and he doesn’t move his face out of the pillow.

“Hey,” Shiro says, sitting on the bed next to him. “You okay?”

“Mmm,” he mumbles into the pillow. “Tired.”

“You missed training.” Shiro puts a gentle hand on his shoulders, and Keith nods.

“Couldn’t get up. It’s too much.”

Shiro is quiet, just rubbing his hand over Keith’s shoulders before he speaks again. “Come down for breakfast. You should eat something.”

“Not hungry.”

“Keith.” He looks up at him blearily. “You need to get out of bed.”

He uses all his energy to push himself into an upright sitting position, scrubbing at his eyes. He feels scrubby, scratchy.

He feels how he felt in the desert, how he felt sometimes at the Garrison. Very low.

Shiro replaces the hand on his shoulder, and it’s his only tether to reality right now. Everything feels heavy, but the hand is heavier in a good way. Shiro gives him a look. “You feeling okay?”

Lying to Shiro is never good, especially when he can see the answer plainly in front of him, so he just shakes his head. “Not really.”

Shiro nods like he’d been expecting that. He probably had. “You should come down for breakfast. It’s better than lying in bed all day.”

He helps Keith up, and stands with him. He’d slept in his clothes last night, just like the night before, so he slips his boots on and throws his hair into a messy ponytail. He doesn’t want to think about how gross he is right now, he can feel the grubbiness all over his body. They walk together to the dining hall in silence.

Lance is leaning over his seat to mess with Pidge while he eats, shoving his spork in their face. He takes his chair out from under him, watching as Lance fumbles for a second before sitting upright. He opens his mouth to say something, but pauses when he looks at him.

“Geez Mullet, are you okay?”

He can feel the rest of the table’s eyes latch onto him as he sits and scowls.

“I’m _fine_ Lance. I just slept late.”

He opens his mouth to say more, but Shiro stops him with a pointed look.

Keith mostly just pushes his goo around the plate. He has no desire to eat, he’s just not hungry. Shiro and Lance keep eyeing him, so he takes a bite every now and then to appease them.

There are no nearby planets to liberate, and no sign of Galra ships, so today, for all intents and purposes, is a break day. They’ll have group training later on, but the morning and most of the early afternoon is theirs to do what they please.

Lance grabs him when he walks out the door, pulling him off to a corner to talk. Keith crosses his arms.

“Yes?”

“Okay, you kinda look like someone just forced you to stay up three days with no food or water in the middle of the desert in a sandstorm.”

It takes him a second to realize what he said, but he snorts out a laugh at the description once he gets it. He feels like all of those things, so he guesses it must be pretty accurate.

“Lance, I’m fine. Really. Just tired from the last mission.”

“The last mission was a week ago—,” a week? It feels like two days ago. “—And you’ve been getting more bedraggled every day.”

“Bedraggled?”

“When’s the last time you took a shower?”

His hands come up to feel his hair. It’s greasy, greasier than he likes to let it get, and he feels a lump form in his throat. No. No no no.

“Um,” he says, and his eyes are blurring up. Oh god, he can’t cry over greasy hair. Who cries over greasy hair? “Um.” His voice wobbles and Lance’s eyes widen.

“Oh quiznack. Hey,” Lance grabs his shoulders, holds them tightly. “Hey, you’re good, okay? I’m right here and it’s okay. Everything’s okay.”

Keith tries to pull himself back together, allows himself one weak hiccupping noise, and scowls deeply, blinking away the wet. “I’m fine.”

Lance looks at him like he just told the biggest lie in the universe, which, okay fair. Keith bites his lip hard and averts his eyes.

“Keith, buddy, pal, that’s the most obvious lie I’ve ever heard in my entire life.”

“I’m gonna go shower,” he says roughly, pulling himself out of Lance’s grip.

“We’re here if you need us. Seriously. Everyone here cares about you.”

“Right,” he says as he walks to his room.

“Right,” he repeats quietly, once he’s alone in the dark of his bathroom, sitting under the shower spray for more than an hour.

\---

Group training, thankfully, is meditation practice. Clearing your mind to focus better on the mission. Keith knows how to clear his mind, it’s what kept him alive in the desert.

While others are struggling to find something that works for them, he thinks himself back in the desert, breathing in the coarse, sandy air. Back when he wished he was dead when dying was feasible. He can’t kill himself now, he’s a paladin of Voltron, the universe needs him.

The universe never needed him before, but whatever.

He breathes in, out. Remembers the old meditation technique he was taught when he was younger. Imagine your body as extended from you. You can feel each part, but they’re separate. Focus on erasing each part one at a time. Little toe first. Think of a big eraser scrubbing it away until it’s gone. You can’t feel it anymore. Keep going until you are nothing. There is the air, you are a part of the air. You are nothing and everything all at the same time.

He sits like this, silent, legs crossed, for a long time. His breaths are steady, in and out in a solid rhythm, nothing and everything. Nothing and everything.

Vaguely he hears talking and erases that too. He hasn’t done this in a while. Being nothing is nice, being everything is nice. He’s numb to the world.

Until someone touches his shoulder and he’s jolted back into his body. He jumps and glares at the person who touched him. Lance is there, hands up in defense, with Shiro behind him.

“What,” he says bitterly.

“Training’s been over for like an hour. We were gonna just let you sit here until you were done, but it’s been too long.”

Keith declines the hand that’s been extended to him and pushes himself up. “Training go okay?”

Lance frowns. “You were there for it, buddy.”

“Training was fine,” Shiro says. His face looks hesitant. “There was a little bit of… worry to some of the things you were thinking before you cleared out your head.”

He raises an eyebrow. What he’d been thinking? What even had he been-

Oh.

The whole wanting to die and the universe not needing him stuff.

“It’s fine,” he says, shrugging his shoulders. “It’s what I thought in the desert, but not anymore.”

He’s lying through his teeth, and he knows that both Shiro and Lance know, but he couldn’t care less.

“It’s almost dinner, isn’t it? Shouldn’t we get going?”

They both give him looks that mean that they’re not done talking about it, but concede to his topic change.

Keith doesn’t eat much more at dinner than he did at breakfast, and his stomach pangs idly in the back of his mind.

He falls asleep almost immediately after falling into his bed, managing to change into something more like pajamas this time.

\---

Nothing really gets any better. It gets harder and harder to pull himself out of bed in the mornings. If he can’t do it himself, Lance or Shiro practically drag him out of his room. Lance usually makes him do something to actually take care of his body for once and Shiro tries to get him active in the training room. Both of them try to make him talk more than he wants.

Everything is so much more effort than it used to be. He doesn’t even hurt himself that often anymore because cleaning it up is more work than he usually wants to deal with. When he manages to mark himself in some way, they’re either incredibly shallow, or very deep. Not deep enough to kill him, just deep enough for him to have to hold the cloth to them for up to an hour to get the last traces of blood out.

Missions are interesting. Red does a lot of the quick turns because his brain is going too slow for him to catch up with everything that’s happening. When he does know what he’s doing, he’s putting himself in danger, taking shots he shouldn’t because he’s trying too hard to keep everyone else at a higher priority.

Shiro all but carries him out of his lion and out of the hangars. He knows he’s been overdoing it, but he just wants the heavy pressure that’s settled over him to go away. Shiro sits him on the bed once he’s changed and stands, arms crossed.

“What the _hell_ do you think you’re doing?”

“My job?” He says as innocently as he can.

“You know what I’m talking about. Are you trying to get yourself killed?”

“If I say yes, do I get a prize?” His voice is completely flat and Shiro’s face screws up.

“Don’t joke,” he says, but he sounds unsure.

Keith just looks at him. “Didn’t know we were joking.”

“Fuck,” Shiro mutters as he rubs a hand down his face. “I wish you were joking.”

“Hey,” Keith says quietly. “It’s not that big of a deal. Dying kind of comes with the job description—”

“Your arm is practically _open_ , Keith. That doesn’t come with the job description.”

He looks down at the marks he made last night when he had enough energy to pull himself out of the fog with pain. He presses down on the deepest one and relishes in the way it stings.

“Well,” he says. “It’s better than being metaphorically dead to the world.”

“But you want to be literally dead to the world, so it’s not really.”

“We can’t all get what we want, Shiro. I have obligations to the actual universe now. It’s not like when you were dead and I was alone in the desert wishing I was too. I don’t get to actually off myself now. So I either don’t die and wish I was dead, or I die in battle because I’m too preoccupied with my own self pity to do my job right.”

Both of them are silent. “Or,” Keith adds quietly. “I get bad enough that I _actually_ try to kill myself instead of waiting for a stray shot to do it for me.”

Shiro sits next to him heavily and pulls him into a side hug. He goes into it limply. The touch feels good.

“If this is all a joke, I’m telling you right now that it’s not funny.”

“Already said I was serious, Shiro.”

“Tell me what to do to help you,” he says, a touch too desperately for Keith’s liking.

“Just be there. That’s all. There’s nothing I really know how to do to make it better, so just you existing is nice.”

“I can do that,” Shiro say.

“Good.”

\---

There’s a day that he wakes up that he feels like he has all the energy in the world. The bad thoughts are still there, but if he wanted to act on them, he could. It’s probably not better.

He cuts himself enough that he has to wrap his arms because he doesn’t want to spare the time to sit and wait until they stop bleeding. Everything I happening all the time, and he needs to do everything all the time.

He shows up to his and Shiro’s morning training for the first time in what he thinks is two months. Maybe more.

Shiro looks at him in surprise when he walks into the room and grabs a staff.

“You’re here,” is what he says.

“Yeah,” Keith replies simply. “Woke up and felt like I could do it, so I did.

There’s a smile on Shiro’s lips, and Keith smiles back. Expelling all of this energy he has feels good, but when they’re done, it’s not enough.

His head is telling him to take a trip to the air lock, and he could if he really wanted to.

Oh.

He can act on his suicidal ideations now.

Cool.

His leg jumps at the dining table, restless, and Lance just stares at him.

“You seem hyper today.”

“Woke up and felt energized.”

Lance smiles at him. “Well that’s better than what it’s been.”

“Yeah,” he says absentmindedly. His arms hurt now that he’s not doing something, so he pushes at the wrappings when he’s pretty sure no one is looking.

Everyone quickly learns that him having more energy isn’t necessarily a good thing. He’s training himself into exhaustion most days, trying to get all the everything out of him. Things are going so fast in his head that he doesn’t know what to do about it.

Lance catches him stumbling down the hallway in the middle of the night one night with his arms soaking through the wrappings he’s haphazardly put on.

He can see the sick fear on his face as he unwraps his arms and cleans them properly. The way he won’t shut up about wanting to die probably doesn’t help anything.

“Are these enough to kill me, Lance? They should be. That would be nice. Death by accidental suicide. Fitting. It’d be better. Red would be better. Pretty sure the universe would be more protected if I was dead. Everything is all the time, Lance. Everything is so much all the time.”

He holds him when the tiny giggles he’s doing turn into tears.

“I got you,” Lance says as he pets his hair back. “You’re right here with me. Just focus on my voice. Nothing is wrong. You’re so good, Keith. You’re so good. Don’t tell yourself any different. You are wonderful and talented and amazing and none of our lives would be the same if you were dead.”

He stays the night with Lance that night, and when he wakes up, it’s to Shiro and Lance talking in hushed voices. He pretends to be asleep until Shiro leaves, rolling over blearily a few minutes after the door closes. Lance pushes his hair back and smiles at him sadly.

“You good today?”

“Great,” he croaks out.

A few days later, Keith kisses him. It’s abrupt, when Lance has him pinned on the mat, he reaches up and pulls his lips down to meet.

He wants to feel everything not so fast, and the whole world freezes when they kiss. He does it again, and Lance looks dazed, trying to figure out what to say.

“Good?” Keith asks.

Lance takes a second to respond, but a small smile makes its way to his lips. “Good.”

\---

There’s a day when the energy mixes with the low low low and Keith feels a hyperactive numb.

He asks Coran where the cleaning supplies are under the guise that he wants to clean his bathroom, and he’s waved off in their direction without a second thought.

Altean bleach, he finds out, fucking _burns_. It bubbles hot fire down his throat when he swallows it, and not in the good way. His stomach hurts so badly and everything feels like it’s on fire. His throat spasms and he makes it in time to vomit into the toilet before promptly passing out.

Lance is making his way to Keith’s room when he hears retching. Furrowing his brow, he thinks. No one was sick recently, there shouldn’t be any throwing up going on. He continues onto Keith’s room and when he reaches the door he hears a dull thunk.

“Keith?” He knocks loudly. No response. He opens the door anyway. There’s no sign of Keith except- hold on, is he lying on the bathroom floor?

“Keith?” he asks tentatively, making his way towards him. What he finds is not what he expects, and he breathes out a frantic “Oh fuck.”

Hauling up dead weight, oh god dead weight dead weight he can’t be dead, is difficult. Even more difficult is running through the halls carrying his half dead boyfriend and yelling for anyone to help him.

Shiro gets to him first and immediately blanches when he sees Keith in his arms. He pulls him out of Lance’s grip, and he doesn’t even have time to be grateful before Coran slides around a corner, seemingly ready for battle.

“Help,” he says weakly.

Getting Keith into a pod is a process, because he keeps twitching and spasming while they try to get him into one of the healing suits. Lance is shaking himself when Keith is placed in the pod, assured that he’ll be fine in about a day by Coran.

He doesn’t move from the steps of the pod, head in his hands, and Shiro is in a similar state. Lance can tell he’s trying to keep together, to try and be strong or the team, but he knows how much Keith and Shiro mean to each other, and in a moment of clarity, pulls Shiro into a hug and listens to the quiet tears he has.

When Keith pops out a day later, he’s wobbly and stumbling. Lance catches him and he looks at him.

“I’m—” he tries to say, but Lance immediately cuts him off.

“You- You’re so stupid,” Lance ends up saying, pulling Keith into a ridiculously tight hug.

Keith is overwhelmed. He wasn’t- he didn’t expect to get _found_. He’s angry at himself for not finishing it, for having to be back here, for putting them through this.

Angry tears dot his eyes when Lance lets him go, and Shiro takes his place. He does his best not to cry, but everything is still so much, and this isn’t what he wanted, he wanted to go back to being everything and nothing in the universe, quiet in the desert. The hiccupping sobs start, and Lance weasels his way back into the hug, grabbing at Keith tightly.

“We’re okay,” he says shakily.

“It’s okay,” Keith sobs out into Shiro’s chest.

“You’re okay,” Shiro breathes out and pulls them both in closer.

They stay like that for a long time.

**Author's Note:**

> lol what is this? ive had a p bad week nyall  
> i figured im allowed to post some cliche flowery depression writing right? i dont do that, im allowed one every now and then  
> dont judge me too harshly for this one its vent writing in its purest form


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